Suicide bombers storm traffic police HQ in Kabul:Suicide bombers storm traffic police HQ in Kabul KABUL (PAN) A group of suicide bombers stormed the Kabul Traffic Police Headquarters where heavy gunfire was heard early Monday morning , a police officer said. The militants sneaked into the compound in the Deh Mazang locality of Kabul at 5.30am, entering a gunbattle with security personnel, the deputy police chief, Daud Amini, told Pajhwok Afghan News. He said two of the attackers were killed by Afghan National Police (ANP) while the rest were trading fire security forces inside the compound, he added. As usual, The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. The group's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said the target was American training centresinside the compound. Many security personnel were killed, he added. Witness Rahmatullah said five heavy explosions and gunfire had been heard so far. A resident of the area, Mohammad Erfan, said he heard gunshots and a heavy explosion 30 minutes later of the firings. The area was cordoned off by security personnel and the quack reaction forces and Afghan Special Forces are fighting terrorists in the area. Kabul Crime Branch chief Brig. Gen. Abdul Zahir said a traffic policeman was among six people injured in the clash. The wounded were taken to hospitals. The building is located near the border police headquarters. .

English Studies


 THE FIVE STEPS OF THE WRITING PROCESS

STEP 1:  PREWRITING
                   THINK
•         Decide on a topic to write about.
•         Consider who will read or listen to your written work.
•         Brainstorm ideas about the subject.
•         List places where you can research information.
•         Do your research.

STEP 2:  DRAFTING
                   WRITE
•         Put the information you researched into your own words.
•         Write sentences and paragraphs even if they are not perfect.
•         Read what you have written and judge if it says what you mean.
•         Show it to others and ask for suggestions.

STEP 3:  REVISING
                   MAKE IT BETTER
•         Read what you have written again.
•         Think about what others said about it.
•         Rearrange words or sentences.
•         Take out or add parts.
•         Replace overused or unclear words.
•         Read your writing aloud to be sure it flows smoothly.
STEP 4:  PROOFREADING
                   MAKE IT CORRECT
•         Be sure all sentences are complete.
•         Correct spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
•         Change words that are not used correctly.
•         Have someone check your work.
•         Recopy it correctly and neatly.

STEP 5:  PUBLISHING
                   SHARE THE FINISHED PRODUCT
•         Read your writing aloud to a group.
•         Create a book of your work.
•         Send a copy to a friend or relative.
•         Put your writing on display.
•         Illustrate, perform, or set your creation to music.
•         Congratulate yourself on a job well done!

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
-- Jesse Stuart
Why is writing an essay so frustrating?
Learning how to write an essay can be a maddening, exasperating process, but it doesn't have to be. If you know the steps and understand what to do, writing can be easy and even fun.
This site, "How To Write an Essay: 10 Easy Steps," offers a ten-step process that teaches students how to write an essay. Links to the writing steps are found on the left, and additional writing resources are located across the top.
Learning how to write an essay doesn't have to involve so much trial and error.
Brief Overview of the 10 Essay Writing Steps
Below are brief summaries of each of the ten steps to writing an essay. Select the links for more info on any particular step, or use the blue navigation bar on the left to proceed through the writing steps. How To Write an Essay can be viewed sequentially, as if going through ten sequential steps in an essay writing process, or can be explored by individual topic.

1. Research: Begin the essay writing process by researching your topic, making yourself an expert. Utilize the internet, the academic databases, and the library. Take notes and immerse yourself in the words of great thinkers.
2. Analysis: Now that you have a good knowledge base, start analyzing the arguments of the essays you're reading. Clearly define the claims, write out the reasons, the evidence. Look for weaknesses of logic, and also strengths. Learning how to write an essay begins by learning how to analyze essays written by others.
3. Brainstorming: Your essay will require insight of your own, genuine essay-writing brilliance. Ask yourself a dozen questions and answer them. Meditate with a pen in your hand. Take walks and think and think until you come up with original insights to write about.
4. Thesis: Pick your best idea and pin it down in a clear assertion that you can write your entire essay around. Your thesis is your main point, summed up in a concise sentence that lets the reader know where you're going, and why. It's practically impossible to write a good essay without a clear thesis.

5. Outline: Sketch out your essay before straightway writing it out. Use one-line sentences to describe paragraphs, and bullet points to describe what each paragraph will contain. Play with the essay's order. Map out the structure of your argument, and make sure each paragraph is unified.
6. Introduction: Now sit down and write the essay. The introduction should grab the reader's attention, set up the issue, and lead in to your thesis. Your intro is merely a buildup of the issue, a stage of bringing your reader into the essay's argument.
(Note: The title and first paragraph are probably the most important elements in your essay. This is an essay-writing point that doesn't always sink in within the context of the classroom. In the first paragraph you either hook the reader's interest or lose it. Of course your teacher, who's getting paid to teach you how to write an essay, will read the essay you've written regardless, but in the real world, readers make up their minds about whether or not to read your essay by glancing at the title alone.)
7. Paragraphs: Each individual paragraph should be focused on a single idea that supports your thesis. Begin paragraphs with topic sentences, support assertions with evidence, and expound your ideas in the clearest, most sensible way you can. Speak to your reader as if he or she were sitting in front of you. In other words, instead of writing the essay, try talking the essay.
8. Conclusion: Gracefully exit your essay by making a quick wrap-up sentence, and then end on some memorable thought, perhaps a quotation, or an interesting twist of logic, or some call to action. Is there something you want the reader to walk away and do? Let him or her know exactly what.
9. MLA Style: Format your essay according to the correct guidelines for citation. All borrowed ideas and quotations should be correctly cited in the body of your text, followed up with a Works Cited (references) page listing the details of your sources.
10. Language: You're not done writing your essay until you've polished your language by correcting the grammar, making sentences flow, incoporating rhythm, emphasis, adjusting the formality, giving it a level-headed tone, and making other intuitive edits. Proofread until it reads just how you want it to sound. Writing an essay can be tedious, but you don't want to bungle the hours of conceptual work you've put into writing your essay by leaving a few slippy misppallings and pourly wordedd phrazies..
You're done. Great job. Now move over Ernest Hemingway — a new writer is coming of age! (Of course Hemingway was a fiction writer, not an essay writer, but he probably knew how to write an essay just as well.)
My Promise: The Rest of This Site Will Really Teach You How To Write an Essay
For half a dozen years I've read thousands of college essays and taught students how to write essays, do research, analyze arguments, and so on. I wrote this site in the most basic, practical way possible and made the instruction crystal clear for students and instructors to follow. If you carefully follow the ten steps for writing an essay as outlined on this site — honestly and carefully follow them — you'll learn how to write an essay that is more organized, insightful, and appealing. And you'll probably get an A.
Now it's time to really begin. C'mon, it will be fun. I promise to walk you through each step of your writing journey.

Pay attention to punctuation, especially to the correct use of commas and periods. These two punctuation marks regulate the flow of your thoughts, and they can make your text confusing even if the words are clear.
2. Thomas
Participate in NaNoWriMo, which challenges you to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. I noticed that my writing has definitely improved over the course of the book — and it’s not even finished yet.
3. Bill Harper
Try not to edit while you’re creating your first draft. Creating and editing are two separate processes using different sides of the brain, and if you try doing both at once you’ll lose. Make a deal with your internal editor that it will get the chance to rip your piece to shreds; it will just need to wait some time.
A really nice trick is to switch off your monitor when you’re typing. You can’t edit what you can’t see.
4. Jacinta
In a sentence: write daily for 30 minutes minimum! It’s easy to notice the difference in a short time. Suddenly, ideas come to you and you think of other things to write. You experiment with styles and voices and words and the language becomes more familiar…
5. Ane Mulligan
Learn the rules of good writing… then learn when and how to break them.
6. Pete Bollini
I sometimes write out 8 to 10 pages from the book of my favorite writer… in longhand. This helps me to get started and swing into the style I wish to write in.
7. Nilima Bhadbhade
Be a good reader first.
8. Douglas Davis
While spell-checking programs serve as a good tool, they should not be relied
upon to detect all mistakes. Regardless of the length of the article, always read and review what you have written.
9. Kukusha
Learn to take criticism and seek it out at every opportunity. Don’t get upset even if you think the criticism is harsh, don’t be offended even if you think it’s wrong, and always thank those who take the time to offer it.
10. John England
Right click on a word to use the thesaurus. Do it again on the new word and make the best use of your vocabulary.
11. Lillie Ammann
After editing the work on screen or in print, I like to read the text aloud. Awkward sentences and errors that slipped through earlier edits show up readily when reading out loud.
12. H Devaraja Rao
Avoid wordiness. Professor Strunk put it well: “a sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
13. David
Write as if you’re on deadline and have 500 words to make your point. Then do it again. And again.
14. Yvette
Sometimes I type in a large font to have the words and sentences bold before me.
Sometimes, in the middle of a document I will start a new topic on a fresh sheet to have that clean feeling. Then, I’ll cut and insert it into the larger document.
I wait until my paper is done before I examine my word usage and vocabulary choices. (And reading this column it has reminded me that no two words are ever exactly alike.) So at the end, I take time to examine my choice of words. I have a lot of fun selecting the exact words to pinpoint my thoughts or points.
15. Amit Goyal
To be a good writer is to start writing everyday. As Mark Twain said, “the secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
Try using new words. i.e avoid repeating words. this way we learn the usage of different words.
Do edit your previous articles.
Start with small paragraphs like writing an article for a Newspaper, and proceed from there.
16. John Dodds
Remove as many adjectives as possible. Read Jack Finney’s tale, Cousin Len’s Wonderful Adjective Cellar for a fantastical tale about how a hack becomes a successful author with the help of a magical salt cellar that removes adjectives from his work.
17. John Ireland
I set my writing aside and edit a day or two later with the aim of making it terse. It has trained me to be more conscious of brevity when writing for immediate distribution.
18. Jai
Try to write in simple way. Express your views with most appropriate words.
19. Mark
Read great writers for inspiration. If you read them enough, their excellent writing style will rub off onto your dazzling blog.
YOU ARE what you read (and write!).
20. Caroline
I watch my action tense and wordiness in sentences when I am writing my technical diddley.
For example, in a sentence where you say …”you will have to…” I replace it with “…you must…”, or “Click on the Go button to…” can be replaced with “Click Go to…”.
Think of words such as “enables”, instead of “allows you to” or “helps you to”.
If one word will work where three are, replace it! I always find these, where I slip into conversational as I am writing quickly, then go back and purge, purge, purge.
21. Akhil Tandulwadikar
Don’t shy away from adopting the good habits that other writers use.
Do not worry about the length of the article as long as it conveys the point. Of course, the fewer words you use, the better.
Start the article with a short sentence, not more than 8 words.
22. Julie Martinenza
Instead of adding tags (he said/she said) to every bit of dialogue, learn to identify the speaker by showing him/her in action. Example: “Pass that sweet-smelling turkey this way.” With knife in one hand and fork in the other, Sam looked eager to pounce.
23. Aaron Stroud
Write often and to completion by following a realistic writing schedule.
24. Joanna Young
One that works for me every time is to focus on the positive intention behind my writing. What is it that I want to communicate, express, convey? By focusing on that, by getting into the state that I’m trying to express, I find that I stop worrying about the words – just let them tumble out of their own accord.
It’s a great strategy for beating writer’s block, or overcoming anxiety about a particular piece of writing, whether that’s composing a formal business letter, writing a piece from the heart, or guest blogging somewhere ‘big’…
25. Shelley Rodrigo
Use others writer’s sentences and paragraphs as models and then emulate the syntactic structure with your own content. I’ve learned more about grammar and punctuation that way.
26. Sylvia
Avoid long sentences.
27. Mike Feeney
Learn the difference between me, myself and I. For example: “Contact Bob or myself if you have any questions.” I hear this very often!
28. Richard Scott
When doing a long project, a novel, for instance, shut off your internal editor and just write.
Think of your first draft as a complex outline waiting to be expanded upon, and let the words flow.
29. David
Careful with unnecessary expressions. “At this point in time” came along during the Nixon congressional hearings. Too bad it didn’t go out with him. What about “on a daily basis?”
30. E. I. Sanchez
For large documents, I use Word’s Speech feature to have the computer read the article back. This allows me to catch errors I have missed – especially missing words or words that ’sort of sound the same’ but are spelled differently (e.g. Front me instead of ‘From me’).
31. Cat
Either read the book “Writing Tools 50 Strategies for Every Writer”, by Roy Peter Clark, or read the Fifty Writing Tools: Quick List on his blog. Then join a writing group, or hire a writing coach.
32. Suemagoo
Write the first draft spontaneously. Switch off your internal editor until it is time to review your first draft.
33. Lydia
If you’re writing fiction, it’s a great idea to have a plot. It will coordinate your thoughts and add consistency to the text.
34. Pedro
Edit your older articles and pieces. You will notice that great part of it will be crap, and it will allow you to refine your style and avoid mistakes that you used to make.
Related Articles
Four Tips For Successful Web Writing
Seven Writing Tips from Stephen King
Daily Writing Tips is Getting a Facelift
Share



Join Over 100,000 Email Subscribers and Get a Free eBook!

Subscribe to DailyWritingTips.com via email and you'll be able to download our ebook, "Basic English Grammar."
You will also get all our writing tips delivered to your email inbox, completely free!
The download link will go along with the first email (you might need to wait up to 24 hours).

95 Responses to “34 Writing Tips That Will Make You a Better Writer”
James Chartrand – Web Content Writer Tips on December 11, 2007 5:50 pm
Nice collection of tips! Some I agree with, some I don’t, but I think what is important to remember is that each one of us has unique tips and tricks to offer for better writing.
Two tips:
Online content writing demands concise business writing. Forget the flowery prose; web content needs more succinct language.
Drop the passive language. “Is being”, “Is used,” “that is being…” Gone, gone, gone. Outdated. Passé.
I’ll offer an extra fast tip, as I’ve found it’s one that many people aren’t aware of:
Word offers a grammar check *and* a style check. If you can work on your writing to the point that you’ve eliminated every green line in your document, you’re that much farther ahead.
Daniel Scocco on December 11, 2007 5:52 pm
James, excellent advice. Shouldn’t expect otherwise from someone with your expertise.
Paige Filler on December 11, 2007 8:40 pm
It would be great to see all of their work as examples of how they apply these tips.
Bern Szpilman on December 12, 2007 3:30 am
Turning off your monitor for the first draft is a great hack I’ll definitely try next time I write. Actually, I have to make the first draft a golden rule, too often I’m caught up revising my writing in the middle of the process.
This is great ongoing reference, gotta save it somewhere delicious enough..
Akhil Tandulwadikar on December 12, 2007 6:33 am
Thank you! Daniel.
Wayne Smallman on December 12, 2007 9:40 am
Some wonderful ideas — several of which I employ myself, so I must be doing something right!
Guy Hogan on December 12, 2007 7:14 pm
No cliches.
Inspirational Editor on December 12, 2007 10:36 pm
Putting events in chronological order seems like a no-brainer, but but watch out for chronologically challenged sentences that interrupt the flow of your writing. I posted an example of it at today http://www.inspirationaleditor.blogspot.com.
Matt Ellsworth on December 13, 2007 12:40 pm
Great tips. more authors on our site should heed your advice. It would make for some better quality articles.
webhopper on December 15, 2007 7:40 am
I am particularly interested in these writing tips as this is one craft I want to improve on. Thank you.
imran on January 21, 2008 5:07 pm
Be a good listener first.As by doing this you will be able to express yourself according to your style very easily.
And try to learn new words as much as you can
Geetha on January 22, 2008 5:57 pm
To be a good writer, we need to read and also practice writing simple draft letters , get it corrected through someone who has good vocbulary and gramatical knwoledge then correct it, rewrite agin. Weekly twice practice this will make you a perfect writer.
skantharuban on January 24, 2008 10:59 am
in first ,you suould read lot.when you read ,enjoy every word and every sentence.after that, write lot. when you write ,enjoy everyword and sentence.
Rashad on February 9, 2008 1:55 am
Thank you for providing these useful tips. I’ve recently searched the internet thoroughly, in search for useful tips. And I must say, this site is one of the most beneficial!
Squeaky on March 24, 2008 3:16 am
I am not that good at writer and I am always looking to improve my writing skills. I surf the Internet a few hours per week looking for new sources and it seems to be helping for the most part.
I did find a URL which has a pretty cool product for checking your articles out. The URL is, https://proofwriter.ets.org/?gclid=CLjL-_HW65ECFSK9FQodIltmwQ
I would like to hear your comments about this service to see if some of you more experienced writers think about it.
Trang on April 9, 2008 5:18 am
I think writing a tip a day is a good way for me to improve my E.But i need a friend who help me correct it.When i write something incorrectly, i don’t know why or where it is incorrect.
munirhussain on April 10, 2008 10:00 am
i want to say about myself. i want to an essay of any topic. but my problem is that i can not write english. sir. if i write an essay of English.
Solomon on April 27, 2008 10:37 am
I feel I have listened to so many writer’s tips to write well. I’ll try using them from now to sharpen my writing.
Thanks for the wonderful post!
PreciseEdit on May 15, 2008 5:10 pm
1, Read. Think about what you read. Talk about what you read. Listen to others talking about what they read. Read what they read. (This helps with content.)
2. Learn the basics of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and usage. Use them. Study them. Pay attention to how well you use them. Study how others use them (or not). (This helps with delivery.)
3. Get help on the parts you don’t do well, and consider the advice you receive. (This helps you combine join #1 and #2.)
PreciseEdit on May 15, 2008 5:11 pm
Bah.
“Combine join”
Oops.
elisha on May 16, 2008 8:57 am
I could offer 3 words: READ, WRITE, OBSERVE. This will help you write.
CraveWorldwide on June 16, 2008 5:48 pm
These tips are awesome. I am a emerging English writer and speaker and this will help me a lot in improving my writing skills.
Thanks
Minah Jerman on June 26, 2008 3:11 am
Much can be said about superfluous words. Meanwhile, please, no more of these: much more better, in order to, in actual fact, needless to say, repeat again? (Need I say more?)
taryn on July 30, 2008 4:56 pm
“I could offer 3 words: READ, WRITE, OBSERVE. This will help you write.”
Could not have said it better myself
Patrique on August 19, 2008 9:13 pm
When editing a novel, is it wise to do it chapter by chapter? Or do you have to wait until the whole novel is finished and start editing then? I find it rather tedious to edit a long piece of work.
Bob Cross on October 31, 2008 1:50 am
Dear writers, readers and friends:
I enjoyed reading the above tips. I value good writing. I enjoy reading for some of the reasons I express below.
After years of doing research on “how to improve my writing style”, I believe the best book ever written on this topic was authored by Robert Grunning (circa 1935). You might know Grunning invented a numeric way to measure “bad writing” and coined the term the “fog index” to help expose poor style and composition. The “fog index” is a technique that helps an author, an editor or a reader estimate the degree of ambiquity or “fog” in a given article. Once the fog is declouded out of a writing, clarity comes into focus. Like a diamond cut from debris, the message is allowed to sparkle with a more profound, uncanny, splendiferous brillance!!!
One other point to keep in mind at all time. Ask as yu compose – who will read what I write? With your target reader in mind, express why your message is relevant and important. Place your message in a context that allows your reader to connect in the first sentence. Use words and terms that reveal the value your message will add to the life of your reader. Do this in a refreshing, stimulating way. Avoid using the drab and depressing phraes that are so common in the inferrior views of our rudest critics.
As you express thoghts, comic relief is always appreciated, well if the person has a impish giggle nerve to tickle. Insight is appreciated by those people who like to read an author resolve one or more of life’s perplexing emotional mysteries. People never tire of having or making more money, saving their time, enjoying better health, being more highly entertained or being delivered from that dreadful sense of boredom that often takes one captive by surprise or by the malicious intent of the people who write books on how to improve your writing style.
Writers will not argue that writing is the purest form of known communication. Writing supercedes all other forms in its display of knowledge. It allows people to imagine a concept and then employ their intelligence and vivid imaginations to fill in the suggested blanks, or to wrestle the folly out of one’s brain. Writing stimulates the mind; it waters the soul; it feeds the heart; and, it reveals and demolishes our enemy’s ploys like no other form of communication. Writers and readers know how writing can start wars or propose peace. We know this intuitively.
Good writers create good reading! Good reading comes from good writings. People read what they value. They reject and purge what they view as being boring, or useless, or vain, or disgusting trash!
A good writer knows what people value, and like, and love! Write something valuable in a way that appeals and penetrates into hearts, minds and souls. People will love you for it!
Wishing you all better reading from better writing,
RAC
Holly on November 24, 2008 1:55 pm
Another aspect that a writer should be conscience of, especially young writers, is to write what comes to you. Don’t just abandon an idea because you think it might be shot down by whomever reads it. Write for yourself, as if you’ll be the only one reading it, and you’ll find that your topics and styles are easier to relate to.
Alexandra on November 28, 2008 3:00 pm
I can’t believe you posted that comment from Daniel! He actually talked about the importance of puncutuation but he misused a semi-colon. That should have been a comma!!!
san on January 2, 2009 2:06 pm
great tips on writing….
when i write i imagine as if i’m speaking to my close friends
angela on January 6, 2009 5:58 am
nice post! thank you so much…this will definitely help me in my quest for stardom!
Rajesh Chaudhary on January 10, 2009 3:57 pm
I have seen people preferring informal writing and even speaking in times. It might be good in some point of time,for, it save most of our time in writing long sentence. But, the best part of writing formal writing and sticking to it is that, you will know your depth of writing standard.
Read as much as you can, for, a good writer is a good reader. Try new vocabulary, find its synonyms, and antonyms. use them and try to find difference even between their synonyms.
Thank you,
Chris on January 25, 2009 6:06 am
Three more tips:
Throw away your thesaurus
Read books you normally wouldn’t read
Write actively, ditch passivity.
No one tip will ever work for everyone, what works for some just won’t work for others. Experiment, experiment, experiment.
Lisa Raupach on January 31, 2009 10:53 pm
I’ve been researching my family, and I am finding that there is alot of diffrenties between todays life and what my ancestors have done and I was thinking of writting a book. But I don,t know if there is a market for this kind of book.
rana ismil on February 22, 2009 9:17 am
It is a wonderful and very useful site not only for me but also for all those who want to become a good writer. I want to become a good teacher of English Language. Please, help and guide me. I will be thankful to you for this favour.
Jameel Farooqui on April 17, 2009 3:39 pm
Compare to reading, writing needs more vocabulary. To become a good writer one needs to be a good reader that improved vocabulary.
danielle on May 6, 2009 1:32 pm
Informative site, thank you. Writing is fun, especially after you corral your internal editor.
Danielle
Zoran on May 21, 2009 1:14 pm
Great article and great tips. I will make sure to read them more then once and to apply most of them if not all.
Thanks!
Regards,
Zoran
Roger C. Parker on June 25, 2009 12:21 am
Your blog in general, and this post in particular, are great resources.
Thank you for sharing such valuable advice. Are you on Twitter?
Roger
Danielle Ingram on July 3, 2009 8:14 am
Great points!
I particularly like number 10, ‘Right click on a word to use the thesaurus. Do it again on the new word and make the best use of your vocabulary.’
I think it is really important to build up as large a vocabulary as possible, this is a great way to get into the habit!
Dr. Boonlert Saisanit, Ph.D. on August 21, 2009 1:46 am
I am a Thai Hypnotherapist, if I write I can write about Hypnosis or Hypnotherapy or Meditation. I am now 75 yeqrs old. In fact, I like reading more than writing, but I would like to try writing about my experiences since I was young until now if possible.
Boonlert Saisanit, Ph.D.
Charles Taylor on December 14, 2009 6:30 pm
Well, to be a better writer, you should pursue the tips found in this blog. To be your own writer, follow the reverence of your mind… conformity, complacency, structure…they are mere pipe dreams of the still born human intellect. Break from that, be audacious. No book or hymn will make you a true writer. No other can truly show you how you should write. And write with a tinge of gravity… write the implacable essence of your soul, whether it be effrontery, or mediocrity.
Melvin on January 20, 2010 11:38 pm
You should take a break for a little while like focus a little on other things then when your done doing those activities ideas will start to flow instead of stressing over what you’re going to write about.
Michael Warren on April 2, 2010 8:04 pm
This type of user generated content is really not a good source for information. There is a good manual called “Tips for Writers”, and some other books such as “The Elements of Style”, that really tell people: how to use punctuation properly, when to use capital letters, sentence structure, grammar, and much more.
Mikes on April 15, 2010 3:18 am
Avoid cliches, and not just cliched phrases – the way a character reacts could be. If someone offered you a spider, would you recoil in horror? thought not.
carrie.nelson1 on June 8, 2010 10:41 am
i need help with write what this words mean omit needles words
carrie.nelson1 on June 8, 2010 10:46 am
i need help with the discussion on /specific /measurable/ attainable /relevant /time-bound / how do i discussion the words in a statement .
carrie.nelson1 on June 8, 2010 10:47 am
how would i write this words abbreviation please help me please?
lee hsieh on July 3, 2010 10:19 am
As a teacher, I am trilingual. I coach Chinese, Spanish and English in Latin America.
Writing is a job I enjoy most. Kindly give me more tips.
Lee
lee hsieh on July 3, 2010 10:21 am
Doing translation helps build writing skills.
I.P.Adhikari on August 5, 2010 6:10 am
The one and only way to be a perfect writer is to:
Read, Read, Read.
Write, Write, Write
Everyday!
Kelly on September 10, 2010 10:05 pm
A good way to get over writer’s block is to just take a break and write something fun, something silly. Just make up a little story with a talking pen, or something unrealistic.
syed nadeem pasha s on December 18, 2010 4:04 am
the words spoken by mouth that are not taken by back but u can save your words by writing in book so writing makes the human being perfect
syed nadeem pasha s on December 18, 2010 4:06 am
At some point, you’ll need to let others read your writing. Not just the person who you’re allowing to read it, but the general public. You’ll need to publish your book or short story or poem, or write for a publication. If you’re already doing a blog, that’s good, but if no one reads it, then you need to find a bigger blog and try to submit a guest post. Putting your writing out in the public can be nerve-wracking, but it is a crucial (if painful) part of every writer’s growth. Just do it.
James K on January 2, 2011 10:54 pm
Example of writeing essay story or whatever:
your typeing your half thought out story and fix and alter it to however it looks best, then BAM you get stuck in the middle of the lame part and it starts going slow
Solution:
your typeing your half thought out story and fix and alter it to however it looks best, then Bam u get sluggish and have trouble continueing so you skip ahead to a well thought out part/exiteing/easyer part then after that try connecting the 2 parts together, this helps me
>>also, if you cant think of the right word but think of one that will work ok but you want something better right click and use the thesaurus on microsoft word (PC)
or hold the apple button and click on word (MAC)
Bri on March 23, 2011 4:15 pm
Any tips on character development in stories?
AH on March 30, 2011 8:00 am
Nice. I like this;
. Bill Harper
Try not to edit while you’re creating your first draft. Creating and editing are two separate processes using different sides of the brain, and if you try doing both at once you’ll lose. Make a deal with your internal editor that it will get the chance to rip your piece to shreds; it will just need to wait some time.
A really nice trick is to switch off your monitor when you’re typing. You can’t edit what you can’t see.
Alia on April 17, 2011 5:22 pm
This is a piece of writing I wrote and it is called:Novembers’ Neon Night
Stumbling occasionally, my skeletal fingers were daggers in my palm whilst the eeriness invaded me. Mercifully, I surrendered to the pitch black arcade of warriors; the moon tracing my every step like a murderer…The trees laughed menacingly at me-the glacial wind gushed in response to my hot humiliation, offering cruel kindness! Regaining strength, I glared viciously at the globe of night, chuckling in sarcasm.
The battle had commenced. A matter of pride.Glory.Victory…
Blindingly powerful, a troop of petite stars whisked towards me, huddling in a sphere of illuminating light! Ferocious rage trickled down my spine and, perplexed, I hit reality-this was humane power V dark forces! Droplets of determination assembled in me, my teeth clenched in vengeance and, bracing myself for the worst, I shielded myself in helpless defence! Despair flooded in a river-one that I was drowning in, hanging by a branch-swearing solidly for 2 minutes, I tuned myself out of pitying the nights’ hypnotised soldiers because I was conscious of the alarming fact lurking in the shadows-if I didn’t stop this constant fretting, my ally was going to thrash me. A scene in words, a harsh lesson of life in reality…
like:
Alia on April 18, 2011 10:45 am
When writing speech,you can write to convey an accent.e.g.
I’ve bin wundrin where ya were.This is to convey a Yorkshire accent.
Mary on May 11, 2011 10:04 pm
Want to slow down your editing and proofreading? Try reading aloud what you’ve written starting with your last sentence, then your next to last sentence, and so on until you get to your first sentence.
Hannah Jackson on June 2, 2011 2:21 pm
I think that this really helped me do my English essays and i hope it just as useful to others as it was for me.
Hannah
Chris on June 8, 2011 5:57 am
I use friends personality’s in my writing. I am only 15 and I really enjoy writing, I write for my friends who enjoy every new novel I produce. I don’t care if in future my books will be published. But getting back, I am currently writing a war story. I use my friends as characters, not all the characters, but some. I will sometimes give them a situation in the book, and ask them what they would say or do. So I get realistic and different results to the nature of my characters. Try it, I only enjoy writing when I involve others. Writing can be a group activity!
Gopalakrishna S R on July 15, 2011 8:05 am
Really it is a fantasting contribution to help the persons yearning to write about something they feel and experience in their lives. I read much but hesitate to write about what I think. These tips have instilled courage and determination to start writing. Thank you for enthusing me to venture to write in future without caring any negative criticism. Thank you once again!
langlang33 on September 10, 2011 4:02 am
Often I do not set up on weblogs, but I wish to say that this put up genuinely pressured me to do this! seriously excellent post
samuel g wangoto on September 19, 2011 11:01 am
Hi.for good advice
i am just want to enquirer if can help to avoid spelling mistakes when writting a sentence or memo and how to improve my vocabulary
muneka on September 21, 2011 6:23 am
This is very helpful  One of the best I’ve seen.
I’m 16 and am very much hoping to become an English Major but still lacking writing skills. I wish I could do more!
Matt Stafford on October 31, 2011 4:11 am
Great information. The most important thing of course is just do it. Practice makes perfect
Hannah Davis on October 31, 2011 7:35 pm
I’m sorry to say, but I was excited about reading these pointers. The problem is that the very first one about punctuation had an error right in the comment/tip/pointer. Here it is:
Daniel
Pay attention to punctuation, especially to the correct use of commas and periods. These two punctuation marks regulate the flow of your thoughts, and they can make your text confusing even if the words are clear.
What happened to the comma before the word even? ….can make your text confusing, even if the words are clear.
How disheartening!
Douglas on November 7, 2011 5:26 pm
Here’s a tip on imagination. If you want to sink deep into your inside (brain’s) imagination, it’s good to start with the outside imagination. I mean, start with something you really appreciate or like very much. It could be a picture, a song, a few words, an object you see, a smell… it can be anything. It will give your mind a platform for creativity to build over and transform something like a photograph into a novel!
Gail on January 29, 2012 1:39 pm
I enjoyed these comments so much. I rarely have the ambition and inspiration to write. Sometimes I have to write just like I have to breathe. I deeply admire anyone who writes on a regular basis. Every criticism I have received in reference to anything I’ve written has helped me immensely. However, I do not have the fortitude to join the ranks of people who call themselves writers, even though I am old enough to have developed a thick skin. Cheers!
Selina on April 3, 2012 1:37 pm
I really love all of these ideas to help others write. They are definitely helping me to improve my skills; I have got into the habit of writing every day and even though I am always quite busy, I have gotten up to nearly 1000 words a day. Thanks for the tips!
Nate on May 23, 2012 10:16 pm
Great tips. I like shutting off the editor of internal voices lol. Lot of neat tips and tricks i have learned greatly from. Awesome stuff
Romy singh on May 28, 2012 4:00 pm
Great writing tips contribution. Thanks to all people’s for sharing their writing tips to make writer’s life easier.
So here i would like to make my writing suggestion:
“It’s Not About Being A Best Word Player, It’s All About Being A Better Artist.”
Never run for mastering writing, because you can’t. Always try to chase your passion, always try to enjoy every copy you write. And devote as much as time you can devote to writing. You’ll able to become a better writer in short while.
Once again thanks to everybody.
Fawad on May 31, 2012 9:30 am
The above comment was good to read. I rarely have the ambition and inspiration to write but i have good experience on writing. Sometimes I have to write just like the ugly but I can handle it with my good writing skills, one of the my best writing skills is POSITIVE THINKING.
Hamza Javed on June 1, 2012 5:26 am
The above comments were good to read. Now i know more about writing a good story then i knew. Sometimes i have to write a confusing one, but i can handle it with my good writing skills.
Muhammad Hamza Javed
maddy on June 14, 2012 7:20 pm
Don’t over use an explemation mark it doesn’t fit in some peoples writing material.
Birungi Berna on July 6, 2012 5:15 am
I think i have borrowed a leaf from these writing tips i have always had a passion for writing since my high school only i had become reluctant about it!I now feel i should get back into writing especially after the inspirational tips.
Erik van Zadel on August 25, 2012 5:22 pm
I do not agree with tip 26 (by Sylvia): “Avoid long sentences.” It is a strategy used by many writers nowadays, but should really every sentence be short?
1) Alternation of short and long sentences gives a variation in rhythm, which is more pleasant to read/ to listen to and helps the listener/reader to stay focused.
2) Moreover, the exclusive use of short sentences tends to make the message longer. For instance:
“John turned around. He left the beach. He went home.”
sounds more tedious and is longer than:
“John turned around, left the beach and went home.”
3) Finally, a precise description sometimes demands long(er) sentences. That is why law texts use long sentences a lot.


2.2. 
General definitions 3
After the completion of the first edition of the BNC, a phase of tagging improvement was
undertaken at Lancaster University with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council (Research Grant No. GR/F 99847). This tagging enhancement project
was led by Geoffrey Leech, Roger Garside and Tony McEnery. The main objective was to
correct as many tagging errors as possible, using an enhanced version of Claws4. In addition,
a new tool was developed (the Template Tagger) for ‘patching’ the corpus in such a way as to
eliminate further sets of errors by rule. This tool was developed by Michael Pacey, building on
a prototype written by Steven Fligelstone. The research team working on tagging improvement
was Nicholas Smith (lead researcher), Martin Wynne and Paul Baker.
Correction and validation of the bibliographic and contextual information in all the BNC
Headers was carried out at OUCS by Lou Burnard, with assistance at various stages from
Andrew Hardie and Paul Groves, who helped check demographic details for all spoken texts,
and in particular from David Lee, who checked bibliographic and classification information
for the bulk of the written texts. Thanks are also due to the many users of the original version
of the BNC who took the time to notify us of errors they found.
Thanks are also due to Sebastian Rahtz for his help in the production of this manual.
2. Design of the corpus
This section discusses some of the basic design issues underlying the creation of the BNC. It
summarizes the kinds of uses for which the corpus is intended, and the principles upon which it
was created. Some summary information about the composition of the corpus is also included.
2.1. Purpose
The uses originally envisaged for the British National Corpus were set out in a working
document called Planned Uses of the British National Corpus BNCW02 (11 April 91). This
document identified the following as likely application areas for the corpus:
• reference book publishing
• academic linguistic research
• language teaching
• artificial intelligence
• natural language processing
• speech processing
• information retrieval
The same document identified the following categories of linguistic information derivable
from the corpus:
• lexical
• semantic/pragmatic
• syntactic
• morphological
• graphological/written form/orthographical
2.2. General definitions
The British National Corpus is:
• a sample corpus: composed of text samples generally no longer than 45,000 words.
• a synchronic corpus: the corpus includes imaginative texts from 1960, informative
texts from 1975.
4 2.3. Composition
• a general corpus: not specifically restricted to any particular subject field, register
or genre.
• a monolingual British English corpus: it comprises text samples which are substantially
the product of speakers of British English.
• a mixed corpus: it contains examples of both spoken and written language.
2.3. Composition
There is a broad consensus among the participants in the project and among corpus linguists
that a general-purpose corpus of the English language would ideally contain a high proportion
of spoken language in relation to written texts. However, it is significantly more expensive to
record and transcribe natural speech than to acquire written text in computer-readable form.
Consequently the spoken component of the BNC constitutes approximately 10 per cent (10
million words) of the total and the written component 90 per cent (90 million words). These
were agreed to be realistic targets, given the constraints of time and budget, yet large enough
to yield valuable empirical statistical data about spoken English. In the BNC sampler, a two
per cent sample taken from the whole of the BNC, spoken and written language are present in
approximately equal proportions, but other criteria are not equally balanced.
From the start, a decision was taken to select material for inclusion in the corpus according
to an overt methodology, with specific target quantities of clearly defined types of language.
This approach makes it possible for other researchers and corpus compilers to review, emulate
or adapt concrete design goals. This section outlines these design considerations, and reports
on the final make-up of the BNC.
This and the other tables in this section show the actual make-up of the second version of
the British National Corpus (the BNC World Edition) in terms of
• texts : number of distinct samples not exceeding 45,000 words
• S-units: number of <s> elements identified by the CLAWS system (more or less
equivalent to sentences)
• W-units: number of <w> elements identified by the CLAWS system (more or less
equivalent to words)
For further explanation of <s> and <w> elements, see section 5.4 (Segments and words).
The BNC World Edition contains 4054 texts and occupies (including SGML markup)
1,508,392 Kbytes, or about 1.5 Gb. In total, it comprises just over 100 million orthographic
words (specifically, 100,467,090), but the number of w-units (POS-tagged items) is slightly
less: 97,619,934. The total number of s-units identified by CLAWS is just over 6 million
(6,053,093). Counts for these and all the other elements tagged in the corpus are provided
below in 10.1 (Elements defined by the BNC DTD)
In the following tables both an absolute count and a percentage are given for all the counts.
The percentage is calculated with reference to the relevant portion of the corpus, for example,
in the table for "written text domain", with reference to the total number of written texts. These
reference totals are given in the first table below.
Table 1. Composition of the BNC World Edition
Text type Texts Kbytes W-units S-units percent
Spoken demographic 153 4206058 4.30 610563 10.08
Spoken context-governed 757 6135671 6.28 428558 7.07
All Spoken 910 10341729 10.58 1039121 17.78
Written books and periodicals 2688 78580018 80.49 4403803 72.75
3.1. Sampling basis: production and reception 5
Written-to-be-spoken 35 1324480 1.35 120153 1.98
Written miscellaneous 421 7373707 7.55 490016 8.09
All Written 3144 87278205 89.39 5013972 82.82
All texts are also classified according to their date of production. For spoken texts, the date
was that of the recording. For written texts, the date used for classification was the date of
production of the material actually transcribed, for the most part; in the case of imaginative
works, however, the date of first publication was used. Informative texts were selected only
from 1975 onwards, imaginative ones from 1960, reflecting their longer “shelf-life”, though
most (75 per cent ) of the latter were published no earlier than 1975.
Table 2. Date of production
Spoken and written components of the corpus are discussed separately in the next two
sections.
3. Design of the written component
3.1. Sampling basis: production and reception
While it is sometimes useful to distinguish in theory between language which is received (read
and heard) and that which is produced (written and spoken), it was agreed that the selection of
samples for a general-purpose corpus must take account of both perspectives.
Text that is published in the form of books, magazines, etc., is not representative of the
totality of written language that is produced, as writing for publication is a comparatively
specialized activity in which few people engage. However, it is much more representative of
written language that is received, and is also easier to obtain in useful quantities, and thus
forms the greater part of the written component of the corpus.
There was no single source of information about published material that could provide a
satisfactory basis for a sampling frame, but a combination of various sources furnished useful
information about the totality of written text produced and, particularly, received, some sources
being more significant than others. They are principally statistics about books and periodicals
that are published, bought or borrowed.
Catalogues of books published per annum tell us something about production but little
about reception as many books are published but hardly read.
A list of books in print provides somewhat more information about reception as time will
weed out the books that nobody bought (or read): such a list will contain a higher proportion
of books that have continued to find a readership.
The books that have the widest reception are presumably those that figure in bestseller lists,
particularly prize winners of competitions such as the Booker or Whitbread. Such works were
certainly candidates for inclusion in the corpus, but the statistics of book-buying are such that
very few texts achieve high sales while a vast number sell only a few or in modest numbers. If
texts had been selected in strict arithmetical proportion to their sales, their range would have
6 3.2.2. Sample size and method
been severely limited. However, where a text from one particular subject domain was required,
it was appropriate to prefer a book which had achieved high sales to one which had not.
Library lending statistics, where these are available, also indicate which books enjoy a
wide reception and, like lists of books in print, show which books continue to be read.
Similar observations hold for magazines and periodicals. lists of current magazines and
periodicals are similar to catalogues of published books, but perhaps more informative about
language reception, as it may be that periodicals are bought and read by a wider cross-section
of the community than books. Also, a periodical that fails to find a readership will not continue
to be published for long.
Periodical circulation figures have to be treated with the same caution as bestseller lists, as
a few titles dominate the market with a very high circulation. To concentrate too exclusively on
these would reduce the range of text types in the corpus and make contrastive analysis difficult.
Published written texts were selected partly at random from Whitaker’s Books in Print for
1992 and partly systematically, according to the selection features outlined in section 3.2
(Selection features) below.
Available sources are concerned almost exclusively with published books and periodicals.
It is much more difficult to obtain data concerning the production or reception of unpublished
writing. Intuitive estimates were therefore made in order to establish some guidelines for text
sampling in the latter area.
3.2. Selection features
Texts were chosen for inclusion according to three selection features: domain (subject field),
time (within certain dates) and medium (book, periodical, etc.).
The purpose of these selection features was to ensure that the corpus contained a broad range
of different language styles, for two reasons. The first was so that the corpus could be regarded
as a microcosm of current British English in its entirety, not just of particular types. The second
was so that different types of text could be compared and contrasted with each other.
3.2.1. Selection Procedure
Each selection feature was divided into classes (e.g. “Medium” into books, periodicals,
unpublished etc.; “Domain” into imaginative, informative, etc.) and target percentages were
set for each class. These percentages are quite independent of each other: there was no attempt,
for example, to make 25 per cent of the selected periodicals imaginative.
Seventy-five per cent of the samples were to be drawn from informative texts, and the
remaining 25 per cent from imaginative texts.
titles were to be taken from a variety of media, in the following proportions: 60 per cent
from books, 30 per cent from periodicals, 10 per cent from miscellaneous sources (published,
unpublished, and written to be spoken).
Half of the books in the “Books and Periodicals” class were selected at random from
Whitaker’s Books in Print 1992. This was to provide a control group to validate the categories
used in the other method of selection: the random selection disregarded Domain and Time, but
texts selected by this method were classified according to these other features after selection.
3.2.2. Sample size and method
For books, a target sample size of 40,000 words was chosen. No extract included in the corpus
exceeds 45,000 words. For the most part, texts which in their entirety were shorter than 40,000
words were further reduced by ten per cent for copyright reasons; a few texts longer than
the target size were however included in their entirety. Text samples normally consist of a
continuous stretch of discourse from within the whole. A convenient breakpoint (e.g. the end
of a section or chapter) was chosen as far as possible to begin and end the sample so that
3.2.4. Medium 7
high-level discourse units were not fragmented. Only one sample was taken from any one
text. Samples were taken randomly from the beginning, middle or end of longer texts. (In a
few cases, where a publication included essays or articles by a variety of authors of different
nationalities, the work of non-UK authors was omitted.)
Some types of written material are composite in structure: that is, the physical object in
written form is composed of more than one text unit. Important examples are issues of
a newspaper or magazine which, though editorially shaped as a document, contain discrete
texts, each with its specific authorship, stylistic characteristics, register and domain. The BNC
attempts to separate these discrete texts where appropriate and to classify them individually
according to the selection and classification features. As far as possible, the individual stories
in one issue of a newspaper were grouped according to domain, for example as “Business”
articles, “Leisure” articles, etc.
The following subsections discuss each selection criterion, and indicate the actual numbers
of words in each category included.
Domain
Classification according to subject field seems hardly appropriate to texts which are fictional
or which are generally perceived to be literary or creative. Consequently, these texts are all
labelled imaginative and are not assigned to particular subject areas. All other texts are treated


The ‘Miscellaneous published’ category includes brochures, leaflets, manuals, advertisements.
The ‘Miscellaneous unpublished’ category includes letters, memos, reports, minutes,
essays. The ‘written-to-be-spoken’ category includes scripted television material, play scripts
etc.
3.3. Descriptive features
Written texts may be further classified according to sets of descriptive features. These features
describe the sample texts; they did not determine their selection. This information is recorded
to allow more delicate contrastive analysis of particular sets of texts. As a simple example,
the gross division into two time periods in the selection features can, of course, be refined and
subcorpora defined over the BNC for more specific dates. However, the relative sizes of such
subcorpora are undefined by the BNC design specification.
These descriptive features were monitored during the course of the data gathering, and text
selection, in cases where a free choice of texts was available, took account of the relative
balance of these features. Thus although no relative proportions were defined for different
target age groups (for example), we ensured that the corpus does contain texts intended for
children as well as for adults.
The following tables summarize the results for the first release of the corpus. Note that many
texts remain unclassified.
3.3.1. Author information
Information about authors of written texts was included only where it was readily available,
for example from the dust-wrapper of a book. Consequently, the coverage of such information
is very patchy. The authorship of a written text was characterized as ‘corporate’ where it was
produced by an organization and no specific author was given, and as ‘multiple’ in cases where
several authors were named. Author sex was classified as “mixed” where more than one author
of either sex was specified, and “unknown” where it could not reliably be determined from the
author’s name. Note that ‘author age’ means the author’s age at the time of creation of the
work concerned.
4. Design of the spoken component
Lexicographers and linguists have long hoped for corpus evidence about spoken language,
but the practical difficulties of transcribing sufficiently large quantities of text have prevented
the construction of a spoken corpus of over one million words. The British National Corpus
project undertook to produce five to ten million words of orthographically transcribed speech,
covering a wide range of speech variation. A large proportion of the spoken part of the corpus
—over four million words—comprises spontaneous conversational English. The importance
of conversational dialogue to linguistic study is unquestionable: it is the dominant component
of general language both in terms of language reception and language production.
As with the written part of the corpus, the most important considerations in constructing the
spoken part were sampling and representativeness. The method of transcription was also an
important issue.
The issues of corpus sampling and representativeness have been discussed at great length by
many corpus linguists. With spoken language there are no obvious objective measures that can
be used to define the target population or construct a sampling frame. A comprehensive list of
text types can be drawn up but there is no accurate way of estimating the relative proportions of
each text type other than by a priori linguistically motivated analysis. An alternative approach,
one well known to sociological researchers, is demographic sampling, and this was broadly the
approach adopted for approximately half of the spoken part of the corpus. The sampling frame
was defined in terms of the language production of the population of British English speakers
in the United Kingdom. Representativeness was achieved by sampling a spread of language
producers in terms of age, gender, social group, and region, and recording their language output
over a set period of time.
We recognised, however, that many types of spoken text are produced only rarely in comparison
with the total output of all “speech producers”: for example, broadcast interviews, lectures,
legal proceedings, and other texts produced in situations where — broadly speaking — there
are few producers and many receivers. A corpus constituted solely on the demographic model
would thus omit important spoken text types. Consequently, the demographic component of
the corpus was complemented with a separate text typology intended to cover the full range of
linguistic variation found in spoken language; this is termed the context-governed part of the
corpus.
4.1. The demographically sampled part of the corpus
The approach adopted uses demographic parameters to sample the population of British
English speakers in the United Kingdom. Established random location sampling procedures
were used to select individual members of the population by personal interview from across the
country taking into account age, gender, and social group. Selected individuals used a portable
tape recorder to record their own speech and the speech of people they conversed with over a
period of up to a week. In this way a unique record of the language people use in everyday
conversation was constructed.
4.1.1. Sampling procedure
124 adults (aged 15+) were recruited from across the United Kingdom. Recruits were of both
sexes and from all age groups and social classes. The intention was, as far as possible, to
recruit equal numbers of men and women, equal numbers from each of the six age groups, and
equal numbers from each of four social classes.
Additional recordings were gathered for the BNC as part of the University of Bergen COLT
Teenager Language Project. This project used the same recording methods and transcription
scheme as the BNC, but selected only respondents aged 16 or below.

Markup conventions 17
The original BNC encoding format was strongly influenced by the proposals of the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI). This international research project resulted in the development of a
set of comprehensive guidelines for the encoding and interchange of a wide range of electronic
texts amongst researchers. An initial report appeared in 1991, and a substantially revised
and expanded version in early 1994. A conscious attempt was made to conform to TEI
recommendations, where these had already been formulated, but in the first version of the
BNC there were a number of differences in tag names, and models. In the present edition
of the BNC, the tagging scheme has been changed to conform as far as possible with the
published Recommendations of the TEI. Unless otherwise stated, elements used here have the
same meaning as those of the published TEI scheme. More information about the relationship
between the BNC’s markup and both its original CDIF format and the TEI standard are given
in section 9 (Compatibility issues).
Section 5 (Basic structure) describes the basic structure of the British National Corpus, in
terms of the SGML elements distinguished and the tags used to mark them up. Section 6
(Written texts) describes the elements which are peculiar to written texts, and section 7 (Spoken
texts) those peculiar to spoken texts. In each case, a distinction is made between those elements
which are marked up in all texts and those which (for technical or financial reasons) are not
always so distinguished, and hence appear in some texts only.
Section 8 (The header) describes the structure of the <teiHeader> element attached to
each component of the corpus, and also to the whole corpus itself. Sections 6 (Written texts)
and 7 (Spoken texts) informally describe the elements specific to written and to spoken texts
respectively. It should be noted that by no means all of the features described here will be
present in every text of the corpus, nor, if present, will they necessarily be tagged. A list of
elements actually used in the whole corpus is given below in 10.1 (Elements defined by the
BNC DTD).
5.1. Markup conventions
The BNC texts use the “reference concrete syntax” of SGML, in which all elements are
delimited by the use of tags. There are two forms of tag, a start-tag, marking the beginning of
an element, and an end-tag marking its end. Tags are delimited by the characters < and >, and
contain the name of the element (its gi, for generic identifier), preceded by a solidus (/) in the
case of an end-tag.
For example, a heading or title in a written text will be preceded by a tag of the form <head>
and followed by a tag in the form </head>. Everything between these two tags is regarded as
the content of an element of type <head>.
Attributes applicable to element instances, if present, are also indicated within the start-tag,
and take the form of an attribute name, an equal sign and the attribute value, which may be a
number, a string literal or a quoted literal. Attribute values are used for a variety of purposes,
notably to represent the part of speech codes allocated to particular words by the CLAWS
tagging scheme.
For example, the <head> element may take an attribute type which categorizes it in
some way. A main heading will thus appear with a start tag <head type="main">, and a
subheading with a start tag <head type="sub">.
In XML (but not always in SGML), case is significant in all tag or attribute names. A
consistent style has been adopted throughout the corpus. This style uses lower-case letters for
identifiers, unless they are derived from more than one word, in which case the first letter of
the second and any subsequent word is capitalized.
18 5.3. Corpus and text elements
SGML (but not XML) permits various kinds of minimization, or abbreviatory conventions.
Only two such are used: end-tag omission and attribute-name omission. These conventions
apply only to the elements <s>, <w> and <c> (i.e., for sentences, words, and punctuation).
For all other non-empty elements, every occurrence in the distributed form of the corpus has
both a start-tag and an end-tag, and any attributes specified are supplied in the form attribute
name=value (in the body of the texts), or attribute name="value" (in the headers). For the
elements <s>, <w> and <c>, and all empty elements, end-tags are routinely omitted. For these
three elements only, attribute values are given without any associated attribute name. See
section 5.4 (Segments and words) for some examples.
In the present release of the corpus, the headers are marked up using XML: this means that
empty-tags take a slightly different form and that attribute values are always quoted.
Only a restricted range of characters is used in element content: specifically, the upperand
lower-case alphabetics, digits, and a subset of the common punctuation marks. All other
characters are represented by SGML entity references, which take the form of an ampersand
(&) followed by a mnemonic for the character, and terminated by a semicolon (;) where this is
necessary to resolve ambiguity.
For example, the pound sign is represented by the string &pound;, the character é by the
string &eacute; and so forth. The French word “été” (summer), if it appeared in the corpus,
would be represented as
&eacute;t&eacute;
The mnemonics used are taken from standard entity sets, and are listed in section 10.2
(Character entities defined by the BNC DTD).
Finally, although this is not mandated by either XML or SGML, in the present form of the
corpus, tags are never broken across linebreaks. Additionally, an attempt has been made to
avoid linebreaks within the content of a single <s> element, so as to simplify processing of the
text.
5.2. Global attributes
Three global attributes are defined, each of which may potentially be specified for any
element. In practice their use is limited to certain specific functions, which are discussed
at the appropriate place below, but for convenience their use is also summarized here:
id system-generated identifier of an item, unique within the corpus
n any name or identifier for an element, not necessarily unique within the corpus
rend the rendition or appearance of an element.
5.3. Corpus and text elements
The British National Corpus contains a large number of text samples, some spoken and some
written. Each such sample has some associated descriptive or bibliographic information
particular to it, and there is also a large body of descriptive information which applies to the
whole corpus.
In SGML terms, the British National Corpus consists of a single SGML element, tagged
<bnc>. This element contains a single <teiHeader> element, followed by a sequence of
<bncDoc> elements. Each such <bncDoc> element contains its own <teiHeader>, followed
by either a <text> element (for written texts) or an <stext> element (for spoken texts). The
last named element is an extension of the TEI scheme, but the others are all standard TEI
elements, possibly renamed as permitted by the TEI scheme.
The components of the header are fully documented in section 8 (The header). Further
discussion of SGML concepts and practices is provided in section 11 (Software for the BNC).
5.4. Segments and words 19
Note that different elements are used for spoken and written texts because each has a
different substructure; this represents a departure from TEI recommended practice.
Both <text> and <stext> elements take the following attributes in addition to the attributes
globally available:
org specifies how the content of the text is organised. Legal values are:
composite composite content: i.e. no claim is made about the sequence
in which elements inferior to this one are to be processed, or their
inter-relationships
seq sequential content: i.e. the elements contained by this one form a
logical unit, to be processed in the sequence given
decls supplies the identifiers of any specific encoding or editorial conventions defined
in the corpus header and applicable to this specific text
The org attribute is used to characterize the internal organization of written texts. All
demographically collected spoken texts have the same internal organization: each <stext>
element collects together all the conversations for a given respondent, each distinct conversation
being represented by a <div> element (see further 7.1 (Basic structure: spoken texts)).
Since the order of these <div> elements is not significant, the org attribute always has the
value “composite”.
5.4. Segments and words
At the lowest level, the corpus consists of <w> (word) and <c> (punctuation) elements, grouped
into <s> (segment) elements:
<s> a segment of spoken or written text as identified by the CLAWS segmentation
scheme. The global n attribute is always supplied for <s> elements.
<w> represents a grammatical (not necessarily orthographic) word. Note that the
CLAWS definition of a ‘word’ does not correspond with the conventional
orthogaphic definition. Attributes include:
type specifies the word class assigned to this form by the CLAWS
system.
<c> represents a punctuation character. Attributes include:
type specifies the class assigned to this character by the CLAWS system.
For this edition of the BNC, the word class tagging system has been extensively revised. A
detailed description of the tagging procedures and their application is provided by the Manual
to accompany The British National Corpus (Version 2) with Improved Word-class Tagging by
Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith, which is distributed with the corpus in electronic form.
A short list of the POS codes used for the type attribute on <w> and <c> is also provided in
section 10.9 (Word class codes) below. As noted above, the representation of this attribute used
by the current version of the corpus is minimized, so, for example, the word difficulty tagged
as a singular noun, appears as
<w NN1>Difficulty
rather than as the equivalent XML encoding:
<w type="NN1">Difficulty</w>
The <s> element is the basic organizational principle for the whole corpus: every text,
spoken or written, may be regarded as an end-to-end sequence of <s> elements, possibly
grouped into higher-level constructs, such as paragraphs or utterances.
20 5.4. Segments and words
Here is a simple example:
<s n=11>
<w NN1>Difficulty <w VBZ>is <w VBG>being
<w VVN>expressed <w PRP>with <w AT0>the
<w NN1>method <w TO0>to <w VBI>be <w VVN>used
<w TO0>to <w VVI>launch <w AT0>the <w NN1>scheme<c PUN>.
</s>
The n attribute is specified for each <s> element and gives its sequence number within the
text from which it comes. The code within each <w> or <c> tag is the word class code assigned
by the CLAWS tagging system. These codes are listed below, in section 10.9 (Word class
codes).
In most cases, <s> elements will correspond with regular orthographic sentences, and <w>
elements with regular orthographic words. However, it should be noted that several common
phrases are treated as single <w> elements, typically prepositional phrases such as “in spite of”,
while some single orthographic forms such as “can’t” and possessive forms such as “man’s” are
decomposed into two <w> elements. Further discussion of these non-orthographic word forms
is given in the accompanying Manual to accompany The British National Corpus (Version 2)
with Improved Word-class Tagging by Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith.
Fragmentary sentences such as headings or labels in lists are sometimes encoded as <s>
elements, as in the following example:
<div1 org=seq>
<head>
<s n=1>
<w NPO>THEOBALD<w POS>’S <w NN1>ROAD
</head>
<p>
<s n=2>
<w PNP>He <w VVD>walked <w PRP>through <w AT0>the
<w AJ0>white <w NN2>corridors<c PUN>, <w PRP>past
<w ATO>the <w NN1>notice <w NN2>boards<c PUN>.
Partly for this reason, the white space (if any) following each orthographic word has
been retained in the encoded text. Simply removing the tags will in general produce a
correctly punctuated text. (Note however that some punctuation marks are represented as entity
references:
<s n=00024>
<w PNP>It <w VBD>was <w AT0>the<w NN1>sort
<w PRF>of <w NN1>sight &mdash;<w NN1-VVB>the
<w AJ0>poor<c PUN>, <w AT0>the <w AJ0>strange &mdash
<w NN1>which <w AV0>usually <w VVD>alarmed
<w NP0>Graham<c PUN>.
Dashes used to separate numbers are represented in a similar way, using the ndash entity.
Quotation marks are also represented by entity references The reference name used will
depend on whether or not the usage of quotation marks in the text has been normalized.
Information in the header should describe the course taken for a particular text, as described in
section 8.2.1 (Documentary components of the encoding description).
Where the quoted text is a true quotation (that is, a phrase or sequence attributed to someone
other than the current narrator or writer) the <quote> element discussed in section 6.2.2
(Quotations) may optionally be used. This does not apply to dialogue in fictional works,
which is not marked, except by the presence of the quotation mark entities, as in the following
5.5. Editorial indications
Editorial changes made to the texts during transcription are recorded using the following
elements:
<gap> marks the spot where some part of the original source text has been omitted
for some reason. Attributes include:
desc brief description of the material omitted e.g. "name and address".
extent extent of omitted material e.g. "six words".
reason brief explanation e.g. "anonymization", "inaudible".
resp code identifying the agency responsible for marking up the omission.
The <gap> element is typically used to indicate where words identifying persons or places
have been removed during transcription, where labels etc. have been suppressed for ease of
processing, or where material has simply not been transcribed because it is inaudible, illegible
or not transcribable (e.g. figures, graphs).
<corr> any editorial correction or regularization, e.g. of material obviously mistranscribed
or misspelled, or of variant spellings. Attributes include:
sic supplies the original form of the word or phrase marked.
resp code identifying the agency responsible for making the correction.
<sic> a word or phrase which has not been corrected, but which is in doubt; for
example, a spoken word which the transcribers cannot recognise, or a dubious
spelling. Attributes include:
reg supplies a corrected form for the word or phrase marked.
resp code identifying the agency responsible for noting the need for
correction.
In general, the <corr> element is used wherever a word appears to be misspelled in the
source, and the <sic> element where the transcriber is unable to propose a correction, but
believes the original to be erroneous. The <sic> element is also used to mark words which are
intentionally misspelled, for example to indicate non-standard pronunciation; in this case, the
corr attribute is used to supply a standard spelling.
Slightly different transcription policies have been followed by different transcribers, and
consequently these elements may not appear in all texts. The <editorialDecl> element of
the header described in section 8.2.1 (Documentary components of the encoding description)
gives further details of the editorial principles applied across the corpus. The value of the decls
attribute for an individual text will indicate which principle or set of principles applies to it.
The <tagsDecl> element in each text’s header may also be consulted for an indication of the
usage of these and other elements within it (see further section 8.2 (The encoding description)).
22 5.5.1. Some examples
Users are cautioned that the corpus contains a significant number of errors, both in transcription
and encoding. Every attempt has been made to reduce the incidence of such errors to
an acceptable level, using a number of automatic and semi-automatic validation and correction
procedures, but exhaustive proof-reading of a corpus of this size was not economically feasible.
The corrections indicated by the tags discussed above are included only where errors have been
detected, and no claim should be inferred that no other errors remain.

Spoken texts
7.1. Basic structure: spoken texts
Spoken texts are organized quite differently from written texts. In particular, a complex
hierarchy of divisions and subdivisions is inappropriate. The following structural elements
are used to represent the organization of spoken texts:
<stext> an individual spoken text.
<div> any subdivision or grouping of the utterances (etc.) making up a spoken text.
In demographically sampled spoken texts, each distinct conversation recorded by a given
respondent is treated as a distinct <div> element. All the conversations from a single
respondent are grouped together to form a single <stext> element. Each <div> element
within a demographically sampled spoken text consists of a sequence of <u> elements (see
section 7.2 (Utterances)), interspersed with a variety of empty elements used to indicate paralinguistic
phenomena noticed by the transcribers (see section 7.3 (Paralinguistic phenomena)).
Context-governed spoken texts do not use the <div> element; each <stext> element
containing a context-governed spoken text consists of a sequence of <u> elements again
interspersed with a variety of empty elements used to indicate para-linguistic phenomena
noticed by the transcribers.
7.3. Paralinguistic phenomena 33
To handle overlapping utterances, TEI recommends the use of a device known as an
alignment map, discussed in section 7.4 (Alignment of overlapping speech) below. A single
alignment map, represented by the <align> element, may be defined for a whole spoken text,
or for each division of it: if overlap is present, the alignment map is given at the start of the
division or text concerned.
Each utterance is further subdivided into <s> elements, and then into <w> and <c> elements,
in the same way as for written texts.
The methods and principles applied in transcription and normalisation of speech are discussed
in TGCW21 Spoken Corpus Transcription Guide and summarised in the appropriate
part of the corpus header. The editorial tags discussed in section 5.5 (Editorial indications)
above are also used to represent normalisation practice when dealing with transcribed speech.
7.2. Utterances
An utterance is a discrete sequence of speech produced by one participant, or group of
participants, in a conversation; it is represented by the <u> element, which has the following
additional attribute:
who identifies the person or group responsible for the utterance.
The who attribute is mandatory: its function is to identify the person or group of people
making the utterance, using the unique code defined for that person in the appropriate section
of the header (see section 8.3.2 (The <langUsage> element)). A simple example follows:
The code W0001 used here will be specified as the value for the id attribute of some
<person> element within the header of the text from which this example is taken. The code
PS000 is used where the speaker cannot be identified and the code PS001 is used for a group of
unidentified speakers. Where there are several distinct, but unidentified, speakers within a text,
distinct identifiers are used. For example, if text xyz contains two different but unidentified
speakers, one of them will be given the identifier XYZSP001, and the other XYZSP002.
7.3. Paralinguistic phenomena
In transcribing spoken language, it is necessary to select from the possibly very large set of
distinct paralinguistic phenomena which might be of interest. In the texts transcribed for the
BNC, encoders were instructed to mark the following such phenomena:
voice quality for example, whispering, laughing, etc., both as discrete events and as
changes in voice quality affecting passages within an utterance.
non-verbal but vocalised sounds for example, coughs, humming noises etc.
non-verbal and non-vocal events for example passing lorries, animal noises, and
other matters considered worthy of note.
significant pauses silence, within or between utterances, longer than was judged
normal for the speaker or speakers.
unclear passages whole utterances or passages within them which were inaudible or
incomprehensible for a variety of reasons.
speech management phenomena for example truncation, false starts, and correction.
overlap points at which more than one speaker was active.
34 7.3. Paralinguistic phenomena
Other aspects of spoken texts are not explicitly recorded in the encoding, although their headers
contain considerable amounts of situational and participant information.
The elements used to mark these phenomena are listed below in alphabetical order:
<event> any non-verbal and non-vocal event (such as a door slamming) occurring
during a conversation and regarded as worthy of note. Attributes include:
desc description of the event.
dur duration of the event in seconds.
<pause> a marked pause during or between utterances. Attributes include:
dur duration of the pause in seconds.
<shift> a marked change in voice quality for any one speaker. Attributes include:
new description of the voice quality after the shift.
<trunc> a word or phrase which has been truncated during speech.
<unclear> a point in a spoken text at which it is unclear what is happening, e.g.
who is speaking or what is being said. Attributes include:
dur the duration of the passage in seconds.
who the person or group responsible for the unclear piece of speech.
<vocal> a non-linguistic but communicative sound made by one of the participants
in a spoken text. Attributes include:
desc the kind of sound made
dur duration of the sound in seconds.
The value of the dur attribute is normally specified only if it is greater than 5 seconds, and
its accuracy is only approximate.
With the exception of the <trunc> element, which is a special case of the editorial tags
discussed in section 5.5 (Editorial indications) above, all of these elements are empty, and may
appear anywhere within a transcription.
The following example shows an event, several pauses and a patch of unclear speech:




No comments:

Post a Comment

Dear Readers!
Your Comments will be published soon.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)